ANVIL Magazine interview with Bruce Northridge

Renaissance Fair, September 7, 1992.

Published in a 1992 Issue of Anvil Magazine

ANVIL:
Bruce, you used to find the Renaissance Fair fairly lucrative, but not so
anymore. What do you think is happening?

BRUCE: Just this one fair; last year and the year before were excellent.
I think it basically has to do with politics. People are saying, "We're going
to have to tighten our purse strings and knuckle down!" And so, when they
look at ironwork today, it's perhaps considered nonessential. We're trying
to convince them that they're not buying something nonessential, but something
absolutely unique that won't wear out _ ironwork that could actually become
an heirloom, lasting through time _ an investment.

BRUCE: I had to give Toby Hickman, another rams-head maker, a run
for his money! I believe I'm the only one that puts ears on their rams.

ANVIL: Did you learn that aspect of blacksmithing from Toby?

BRUCE: No, I just copied him. What's the saying? "Imitation is the
highest form of flattery."

ANVIL: You started shoeing horses and then became a blacksmith, right?

BRUCE: My apprenticeship was as a blacksmith. I got into it to learn
to shoe horses because it was "manly." I was raised pretty much in Latin
America where a man is this paragon of strength and denial, and the macho
theory was predominate. I was brought up that way, and we were always taught
what a real man should be. I didn't have an example; my father died when
I was two. Later, I spent a lot of time in England learning horseshoeing
in a blacksmith shop. This was in the early sixties. As you know, London
had been leveled, and they were still rebuilding after the blitz. We perhaps
did 70 horses a month, and the rest was rebuilding Edwardian, Victorian,
and all different styles of ironwork _ restoring buildings bombed out during
the war. Later, when I came to the United States, the only thing that paid
was horseshoeing. I finally went to Porterville to get a credential because
people here said that I couldn't have learned it in England. I took a class
from Dave Tyler. In those days it was $4.00 to shoe a horse if they brought
it in. There were two of us: Milt Maxwell and myself. We were the only ones
who had ever shod a horse before. We were doing four to six horses a day.
We basically had a lot of fun, and I got my credential, and eventually my
credentials to teach.

ANVIL: You and Monk formed sort of an unusual partnership, didn't
you?

ANVIL: Your "Guts, Part I and Part II" is based on your relationship
with him, isn't it?

BRUCE:
Sort of taking over where he was with Lloyd. Those horses were real. I did
those horses for four years purely to prove that I could _ the most terrifying
thing I have ever done! Mike Chisholm and I went out there and did them two
or three different times. Mike is big and strong. He'd just grab hold of
them and we'd snub them to trees, but all of them had big lopped ears from
getting into that shed and banging their heads when they went out, which
was the easiest way to do it. One of the many lessons I learned from Monk
was that if the horse went out backwards and got tangled up in the fence,
leave him in the fence. We did many of them tangled up in hog-wire fences.
They can't move, they are all wrapped up, and the owners are horrified! We'd
shoe them and cut them out of the fence. Monk spent a lot of time with Indians.
He was very famous for his bridle horses. He would have four rings buried
in the ground in relation to four feet. He had about six or eight kids, and
he'd hobble the horse to those four rings, standing up, day and night. The
kids would play on the horse like a jungle gym, and the horse couldn't kick,
couldn't move, couldn't move his feet. Then he had 10 or 12 different
Spanish-type bits. When he got through with the horse, he could ride him
with his little finger. There are places you can move where they can't get
to you, and you become the biggest ogre in the world because the horse sees
you. His eyeball is like a fish-eye; you look twice and three times as big
to him as you actually are, and so you have to play all these different games.
There's a lot of psychology with it. Maybe someday I'll write a book about
horse psychology.

ANVIL: I think Mike Chisholm must have picked up some of his attitudes
about horses from you.

BRUCE: Yes, many. I had a shoeing shop in those days, and one day
Mike came in crying "real tears." He had been out to do this horse. The owner
had just gotten out of Napa State Hospital, recovering from a nervous breakdown.
Mike was going to shoe her horse so she could ride. The horse was really
obstreperous in the front feet, so Mike just hobbled the front foot up and
tapped on it, a trick that I taught him. If you can't cut the clinches with
tapping, then hobble the foot up and tap. Well, this horse had been a mamma's
baby. It went over backwards, fell and died right in front of this lady.
Still in her bathrobe, back to Napa she went! Poor Mike was devastated!

ANVIL: This macho thing that you're talking about, do you think that's
a necessary prerequisite for becoming a successful horseshoer and/or blacksmith?

BRUCE: No. I would like to think so because that's how I did it and,
of course, the way I did it is the ONLY way to do it. But, NO. It just sets
up an automatic battle-line between you and the horse. If I start a horse,
I finish it.

ANVIL: Some folks might consider that overly macho.

BRUCE: I did get a reputation for being a heavy-hand, but I also had
a reputation for breaking babies, especially at the Arab ranches and Thoroughbred
farms. I'd get them when they were six- weeks-old. Foaling season was great!
When I got through with the babies after three or four go-arounds, anybody
could pick their feet up. Sometimes it would take two and three hours to
do it. If you can pick the foot up three times and hold it three times, and
the horse doesn't get away, then it's a habit. Three times with a horse is
a habit. If they pull the foot away three times in a row, it's also a habit;
they know they can do it. If they try it three times in a row and they don't
give the foot back, it's a habit; they give it to you and it's fine. But
you have to know all the tricks, basically wrestling. You get right down
and dirty with them, and they'll throw themselves and everything else, but
you stay calm. You keep talking to them and laughing at them _ horses have
pride. And when you laugh at them, they get embarrassed, especially if they
fall down. You quickly get on their neck and you leave them down there. You
slap them all over, and you laugh at them. They don't want to go down again
because that's embarrassing. But then they discover, like some of the
cold-blooded horses, that when they lie down you can't get them back up,
and so you cut their wind off. And I've had many people say, "You're going
to kill my horse!" You just grab their nose and cut the wind off. They don't
know how to breathe through their mouth, and right before they pass out,
they jump up. Sometimes you have to hold that nose for almost a minute, a
minute and a half. They make weird death rattle noises, but they will come
up, even though people get angry about this procedure. And, another thing.
Remember that legally, as a horseshoer, whenever you're working on a horse,
you're liable for whatever that horse does. If it goes through the owner's
front room, breaks windows and everything else, OR if that horse hurts the
owner in any way, you're liable for it. That's the way the law reads because
you're doing it.

ANVIL: Any other tricks?

BRUCE: Oh, yes, another very good trick. If you have an obstreperous
horse, one that's too big and powerful for you to hang onto, take and snub
him up to a post. Give him an inch and a half of rope. Always contrive to
have a huge pocketknife or something, as a pretense of getting something
out of your pocket or sheath. Tell the owner to pull this knife out and stab
it into the post right near the horse's nose, up where he won't cut himself.
And you tell the owner, looking at him square in the eye, "When I tell you
to, cut the rope." And then the horse, of course, is struggling with its
head because it's really locked in. If you're fast, you can get that horse
done in about four minutes. And there's the owner, fixed on that knife, waiting
to pull it and cut the rope. I have used that scam hundreds of times. People
will say "He's magnificent!" And I think, 'Thank goodness we didn't have
to use that!' But it's a way to get the owner focused on something other
than what you're doing.

ANVIL: Any others?

BRUCE: There are a couple of other tricks. There's a nerve ending
at the curve, right before you get to the hock, there's a curve in there,
and you can squeeze it. If the horse is a kicker, it will fire; if not, you
squeeze it, and they start shivering and it will lie down on it. It's a nerve
ending or something. You have this "spoiled- brat" horse, and you manage
to get the front feet done because you can get more control up there, especially
if the owner is on your side. And then you get behind, and the owner is sitting
there holding the rope. It looks like you're going to pick the foot up. You
give it a squeeze. Pow! It fires! And you do it one or two times and the
owner is standing there, "What's going on?" And you say, "Well, all I'm doing
is trying to pick the foot up." They can't see what you're doing. All they
see is this foot flying by, and finally the owner will say, "Well, that's
bad; we can't have this horse kicking." And I say, "Oh, no, we can't." "Well,
can you do something about that?" "Of course, I can do something about that."
So you get carte blanche to discipline the horse. I don't give these tricks
away very often. You have to get out in the field, watch these horses, and
deal with them. You have to make the miracles. I have a reputation of "making
miracles," a reputation which you don't want to get because then it's expected
of you! Many, many ringbone, any kind of arthritic horses; whirl bone disease,
for goodness sake, look at that. You haven't done an article on whirl bone,
have you?

ANVIL: No, what is "whirl bone" disease?

BRUCE: Well, the way to test for it is interesting. You have the rump
right there. I don't know the names of the bones from the rear end, but there's
a part of the hip mechanism sticking out. What happens is a horse will be
coming down a hill in the mud and do the splits, pulls the ligaments way
back, way up in the crotch, back up in there. When they move, they move funny.
The only way you can test for it is you have to take up both sides of the
anus. You'll find there's an indentation there and if you push hard
simultaneously; if they have it, they kick. It's hard to test for it. I've
only worked on two horses that ever had that. Basically, you have to elevate
the heel, like a long egg bar, not a lot of weight. You can't start using
rubber wedges and that sort of thing. You have to contrive to make something
that isn't going to grab. Aluminum works fine; they make it two inches thick.
It won't last very long, but long enough. Two or three weeks later they get
better and better and that's fine. For a lot of hock problems there are ways
to do it that you can take a horse not in competition. In fact, here at the
fair at one point, they had a navicular horse. Of course, the rule of thumb
for a navicular horse is "raise the angle, raise the angle." Well, the mare
held a 65o angle naturally, and the shoer trimmed her to a 73o or something
like that and put heavy shoes and pads on her, and she was lame. So, the
vet came out and said, "We want 3o wedges under her and a rocker toe." In
other words, you want to put stumps on her. Well, the dynamic of navicular
disease is you have a little bone with a huge tendon going over it. You have
to slack that tendon. The way you do that is not by elevating the angle.
You get the proper shoulder angle; you don't cut it down to 45o. You get
the proper shoulder angle and you trim it. You let the shoe hang back. And
if you hang back, then the foot doesn't want to tip over because this is
bracing it. The idea is to keep the dynamic angle, the pastern and everything
else; keep that balanced. Don't go raising it or lowering it to give any
kind of relief. Make sure you have your proper angles; use a light Diana,
I think I really screwed up on measurements here???? shoe _ 1/4 x 1, 3/8,
3/16, 3/4. You don't have to have a huge heavy shoe, especially for any kind
of joint problem. But you have to have what the shoe can do for you, if it
keeps the wear down. It can also hang back. If you have a horrendously contracted
inside heel, put the shoe out where the foot would normally be. They are
not going to pull it off unless you're standing around a trailer. But you
do have that problem, build that inside wall up. Be a little bit of a blacksmith.
There are ways of doing it. Blacksmiths make these fenders that come up,
fill them with soft acrylic, not hard acrylic. It doesn't bind the heel.
I could go on and on about horseshoeing. I've got this reputation. You learn
a lot, you learn about what works.

ANVIL: Bruce, you find that women make excellent horseshoers, but
do you also think that they make very good blacksmiths?

BRUCE: Yes, they do. The girl I have striking for me is really better
at striking, even though she had never struck for anybody before. I once
had a professional smith striking for me, and he would actually try to show
how strong he was. I don't need strength. The hammer does the work, not the
strength behind it. What's behind the hammer is accuracy and speed. The weight
of the hammer determines what's going to happen. I did a little demo for
Al Wagoner for his welding class, and there were mostly horseshoers there.
I needed somebody to help strike on an axe, which takes quick, rapid blows.
I was taking people out of the crowd to see who would make the best striker.
I use an eight-pound hammer, nothing heavy, and these guys would completely
miss the hot iron, hit the anvil, damn near coldcock themselves with the
Di Didn't he talk about this "great woman striker" before? hammer! Finally,
Alice Johnson came up, and she was quick and accurate. And I said, "Lady,
you're it!" She was perfect. I remarked to the other guys, "Gentlemen, learn
something. This is what I need. I don't care how strong you are; I want speed
and accuracy. Watch what I do. It's body language. I was giving them all
sorts of things that a lady would understand, but a guy would ignore because
he's staring at that steel and not listening, not doing anything but
concentrating on hitting it as hard as he can. I think a lady has more awareness,
unless you get European smiths coming over here who have been trained that
way. Now. Alice, she's great _ fire weld, anything. She really makes it exciting
because you can actually feel it under the hammer. Of course, all of us who
do forge realize that half of the forging is feeling what's happening through
the whole hammer and everything else. Once you really get good at it, that's
your addiction. You're pushing this stuff around; you know what a push feels
like; you know what a draw feels like when you actually penetrate the steel
as you're drawing it. It is a high, I don't know how to describe it. It has
nothing to do with machismo at all. I think I've made an addict out of this
little girl!

ANVIL: As the people walk through the Renaissance Fair, observing
what you do, do you think that they even have a clue as to the magic?

BRUCE: No, not a clue. That's why I try to forge wherever I sell because
they look at what I make back there and they can't imagine that a person
in this day and age can do that. They ask me where I get my dies, or my forms.
Is there an outfit in Pakistan or someplace that supplies me with the little
things? They can't believe that you can do this.

ANVIL: You must have done a lot of research in order to do that shoeing
board that you made which covers horseshoes from as far back as Celtic times.

BRUCE: Yes, that took four books. I have a library of about 60 shoeing
books from all over the place. Some in Italian. I took what were the most
diabolical looking things that I saw in the drawings and reproduced them.
And they are not accurate in that the times they came from, they would have
been twice as wide as they were thick, so I should have used 1/2 x 1 to make
a lot of those. I used 3/8 x 1. That's the inaccuracy and so they aren't
totally accurate.

ANVIL: You once designed and loaned out a shoe for a foal. It had
a leather top to it.

BRUCE: Yes, the fellow who took over my class, Stuart Greenberg, has
it. And what they are is when a foal is born, especially a big-money foal,
a purebred, a lot of times their knees are an absolute mess. And the vets
say, "Oh, wait until they're six- weeks-old and then you can start trimming
when the baby's foot is grown. Wait till then, and a good farrier, they say,
can reach a knee and straighten the leg out." No, you cannot. You cannot
reach a knee after six-weeks-old. If you can get to these babies before they're
six-weeks-old, all those bones are still so plastic, you can take a bench
knee and move it square. The problem with it is if that foot was . . . whatever
the bench was causing in the bottom of the foot, you can tell. You look at
the bottom of the foot and basically you have a rough "D" shape. The straight
side is the side the weight is going on. This is called "The Theories of
Rights and Lefts," and it comes from Harness Horseshoeing. I took it to a
fine art when I talked. It said that there are five basic indicators that
will tell you where the weight-bearing side is. If you know where the
weight-bearing side is, that's the side you leave alone. It gives you a starting
point. So you read the baby's foot because you can already see because of
the way that knee is growing _ okay, the weight's going to the inside, the
weight's going to the outside. And you have this little tiny slipper that
you tape on with duct tape that has a huge scroll on one side or you can
turn it around and put the scroll on the other side, depending on the
weight-bearing side. You put the scroll on the weight-bearing side. It only
has to stay on for 45 minutes. Well, the baby runs around trying to shake
it off. And then you'll start to see the knee shake, and that means the knee
hurts. The baby lies down and you take it off. You do it at feeding time
for the mamma in the stall because a lot of times when you first put them
on, they shake them off. And people have to learn to do this twice a day.
When I first started doing them, I would go out and monitor these shoes.
I'd go out every day and look. It was like time-lapse photography watching
these knees just . . . over. Sometimes they'd be twisted; I even had a diagonal
that would take up a twist and then you just offset the knee. Then I was
lucky enough to follow on about ten of these babies up into two, three, four
and five-year-olds. The thing is whatever that read was, the knee stayed
straight, but if the weight-bearing side, as determined by birth or whatever,
was that way they would stay that way. In other words, this one baby toed-in
horribly way to the outside _ classic toe-in. We got him straightened out,
but we would always have to do corrective work on the toe-in, which is no
problem. It's down at the foot, not up at the knee. So, in essence, what
you do is you're removing the problem from up high down low, and where you
can handle it.

ANVIL: Did you have problems convincing people of the merit of your
procedure?

BRUCE: The vets would look at it and laugh. It basically was a variation
on a trick from O. R. Adams who said, "When you have the drop fetlock babies,
just get a fold-over strap hinge and pull it together and tape it on." Of
course, the hinge itself acts as a lever. First of all, it's very long and
it elevates so you're slightly . . digital, and the baby of a young size
as it gets tension it contracts up on the fetlock. And I said, "Oh, if that's
true, what if you turned it at right angles?" So I found a lady that let
me try it. She had a mare that threw this and she kept throwing twice and
she said, "Can we do anything about it?" So I tried with the hinges and it
worked. The next year she had another foal and the baby was just obstreperous
and kept pulling it off. And the lady was having a horrible time and said,
"Can't you make something that will work?" Well, that was all the challenge
that I needed and I started on it. Eventually it evolved and I had about
four of them that Stu has. I kept one if you ever want a picture of it I
can get it. But, it does work. But scientifically I only had 25 babies; I
needed 100 to actually do a paper on it. Twenty- five, yes, I could be just
lucky; 25 in a row I could have gotten lucky. I would really like to do a
paper on it and put it out there so that other shoers could try it. With
horseshoeing, you're dealing with a living thing. There are no rules. The
problem with horseshoeing is everybody wants to get a formula that works.
They are forever writing a hard-core, written-in-stone philosophy. It doesn't
work that way. Every horse is different and peculiar to the area it lives
in, and every foal is peculiar to the genetics behind it, and you have to
get an intuitive grasp about the area you're shoeing in and the horses you're
shoeing. You can't just write a paper and say this is how to do it in Northern
California where it's a high, coastal desert for six months out of the year,
or down in Georgia where it rains every week. If they take what I've written
about a particular area and plug it in over there, it won't work; you're
liable to hurt somebody. That's why I try to stay away from hard-core processes
_ "you have to do it this way." That's why that board is out there. It's
an empirical tour de force. North Africa: heavy, full steel; Northern Europe:
light, not full protection. Just there because the ground is muddy; they're
on the Roman roads, and they needed some way to hold the foot together on
the rocks; whereas, down in North Africa, there is dry, hard desert, their
feet are hard, and all you want to do is keep the feet from bruising, wearing
off too quick, so you need full protection of the sole. Up north, it's too
soft and you don't need that.

ANVIL: Bruce, what's your opinion of aluminum versus steel?

BRUCE: The "be-all, end-all" _ the aluminum shoe? I started making
aluminum shoes when the article came out in Chronicle of the Horse about
the olympic shoer some 20 years ago. Now everybody wears aluminum because
"Oh, it's a competitive shoe." Aluminum works the day of the competition.
You shoe your horse in iron, you shoe him in pads, and you make it really
heavy just like an athlete wearing boots and weights on his legs. You work
him out with that and you make him strong. Then right before the competition
you put aluminum on. The horse flies! And it's an advantage, but if you work
him in aluminum all the time, you might as well work him barefoot. Aluminum
is very expensive; it wears out. The advantage is in the daily performance.
When you want the "nth" degree, then go to the light shoe. But that's too
obvious.

ANVIL: You have come up with some interesting ideas regarding the
necessity of horseshoes.

BRUCE: What about the horses in the wild? They didn't wear shoes because
they weren't being ridden. If they got sore-footed, they died so you had
a natural selection and bred good feet on a horse. Nowadays we breed the
feet off the horses and the feet wear quicker than they grow so we have to
shoe them. What I would like to see is take all these high-bred horses with
all their paper and run them into the sea and turn the rest out on the Nevada
plains. Wait three generations, which would be eight years, take what's left
and use them for breeding stock and then we'd have feet back on the horse.
I used to make miracles. People would say they had to have shoes, pads, clips,
clamps, and hose clamps and everything else; this horse doesn't go grow a
foot. I'd say, "Okay, I want you to get 20 yards of crushed rock, at least
1-1/2 inch in diameter. Put it in the paddock, and we'll take his shoes off,
and I want you to go on a six weeks' vacation. When you come back, your horse
will be sound with a very, very nice foot." None of them would do it. What
you do is you take a poor-footed horse, unless it has been drop-sole or
foundered. You put him on a rocky pasture barefoot. They won't move, they
look horrible. And what happens? Mother Nature takes over and says, "Oh,
oh, I'm going to have to go back to work," and starts adapting that foot.
It's just like you wear shoes all the time. You can't run barefoot across
hot rocks, but if you went barefoot long enough, you could. The same thing
with the horse's foot. They will adapt, they will readapt. No problem at
all. It takes between six weeks and two months to do it. But, "Oh, no, my
poor horse has to have shoes." Yes, now it does because you have it dependent
on them. You can throw those shoes away, put him out on a rocky pasture,
and it will adapt again in two months. I've taken the shelliest, most god-awful
feet. People have the vet come out, and they say, "Oh, this is rotten, we'll
just carve it up." Yes, but at least it's still there; don't do that. At
least it's filling up the space. Don't carve it up. Oh, but they have to
do something; that's surgery. You see, if a vet draws blood in the foot,
it's surgery. If a farrier draws blood, then he's a butcher. One horse had
really thin soles. I was using 1-1/2-inch wide shoes on the horse. And so
the vet came out and said, "This foot's not right." "Don't touch those soles,"
I said. "Oh, no, I'm going to X-ray the feet." And he goes slice with the
knife and the horse bled like crazy. And the girl is sitting there holding
the horse. And he said, "You have to pad this horse." Well, shooting a nail
into a thin wall through a leather pad or any kind of a pad, you try to find
the white line. That's why I like the wide web shoe because you can put the
nail where you want it, and you don't run the risk of binding him with a
pad. Plus pads just make the feet longer, and a pad doesn't dry the foot
off; it keeps the foot soft because it holds all the moisture in. Whereas,
a wide web shoe will toughen the sole because it's not holding the moisture
in.

ANVIL: So you advocate letting the horse go barefoot as often as possible?

BRUCE: Absolutely. If you're in the calvary and you're fighting Indians,
I recommend shoes. But, as often as you can, let Mother Nature do it. If
you have a radically crooked horse that's constantly breaking the inside
heels down, that's confirmation of it. Okay, then you have to keep that outside
low. Give the horseowner an old rasp. He can't really do much damage with
it. Just tell him everyday, or every other day to pull a little off this
one side and keep it rounded it up. They'll get overzealous, they'll feel
great, it will give them something to do. In fact, if a horse is rank or
whatever, send the owner off for something important _ a left-handed monkey
wrench, whatever. By the time they get back, you're finished and have had
time to wash the blood off!

ANVIL: Bruce, you've led a pretty illustrious and sort of vagabond
life through horseshoeing and blacksmithing, and now you're concentrating
more on writing. Where did you develop your very unique writing style, or
did it come naturally?

BRUCE: Oh, you want something mystical? It was in the middle of the
Atlantic coming back on an Italian freighter, a renovated liberty ship. We
were at sea for six months _ and at the exact time that Hemingway shot himself.
The moment his body was cold I became a writer. I was accused of being very
"Hemingwayesque." First of all, we lived in Latin America and my English
was all mixed up with Italian, Spanish, "English-English," and with a Texas
drawl. I was young and quite lusty in those days and hadn't had an ear for
the American language for a long time, but I did have a friend, Bill Long,
from Texas, so I had an English accent with a southern drawl, but no ear
for a simple declarative sentence. I had read Elements of Style, however,
so I knew being concise was a plus. I hadn't read any Hemingway so I started
writing this very Spanish-style of English. All my teachers kept saying,
"Lose the Spanish, lose the Spanish!" I wanted to get published, but I kept
getting rejected until I started just telling the story. Just tell the story;
don't inject anything that you might think is a nice turn of a word. If you
have a nice truism or amorphism, don't use it, stay away from it.

ANVIL: Bruce, you've been a horseshoer, a blacksmith, and a writer.
Can you briefly comment on those careers? And what will be your next goal,
challenge _ or "adventure"?

BRUCE: The beauty of horseshoeing is that it has a beginning, a middle,
and an end; it's all there in an hour, hour and half, or however long it
takes you to do it. And every horse is different. Even if it's a horse you've
been doing for years and years, each time you go and do that horse, it's
going to be different. If it isn't different, you're doing something wrong
because you should be shoeing to improve the horse, even if he's perfect,
which they are not. They are a living thing and something is always happening
to them. So you have a challenge. Each thing in its entirety is a circle,
and you keep feeding it. Blacksmithing is just bigger and bigger. The thing
about blacksmithing is that it doesn't pay. I want to do more writing and
more teaching. I'd like to be known as a demonstrator and do seminars either
in horseshoeing or blacksmithing. I'd like to do a lot of beginning stuff
for blacksmiths if we did the nationals down here. I do what I want to do,
and I'm happy with it. I like to teach, and I enjoy working this fair. As
for writing, it's all in your mind; you don't lose it, it's there, and I
still have millions of "adventures" to write about.

ANVIL: Tell me about your shop.

BRUCE: Basically, I'm a "floating forger." There are a lot of good
shops right here in the area, so they have jobs and hire me to get the job
started. I'm getting too old for the really hard, physical stuff even though
I really loved that. You know, "the mark of blood" and the real sweat _ that's
the old macho thing.

ANVIL: So, being a "floating forger" must afford you many opportunities
to do various projects. Di Don't really see how this answers Rob's basic
question?

BRUCE: Yes, and strange ones. And it also expands. You start dying
when you stop growing. Now, basically, you physically stop growing when you're
about 27-years-old. Then you start dying _ physically, yes, but the brain
never stops growing, so if I can keep learning, keep getting new projects,
keep getting challenged; well, how I got started in horseshoeing was that
I said, "I can do anything." I got accused a lot of times by my peers of
being the most arrogant person that ever lived because, yes, I can do anything.
I got into more trouble with that statement because it forces you to push
your limits. People that build themselves into a little penned-in area have
these limits all locked up in there. They get secure in what they can do,
and they stay right there. In my philosophy, they are as good as dead. For
me, living on the edge is spooky. I'd like to have more money than I'm making
now. That would be nice, but I don't want to get locked in to when I look
down that road I see the same thing over and over again. Keep an open mind
and have the arrogance to say, "Yes, I can do anything," which can also get
you into a lot of trouble. You see, in this day and age the idea if something
fascinates you, you're not going to do it because it might interfere with
the money or this or that. The bottom line is you're not going to get out
of this alive. Life is a terminal disease so you might as well enjoy it.
And if you deny yourself the fascination, no matter how big or small, you're
just driving another nail in your coffin. And something else, my advice,
especially to horseshoers: You don't want to be a macho, but you have to
be tough. In other words, it hurts; it hurts to shoe a horse. There's no
way around it. You're in a god-awful position. You collapse your diaphragm
by bending over, you're not doing anything good for yourself. Your knees
are in the wrong place, your back is all twisted, especially if they jerk
on you. It requires a certain toughness, but it doesn't require like what
I would do _ I'd start to sweat and hurt. I would say, "Aw, this feels good,"
and I started liking the pain because it was more of a credential, more of
a spice to the machismo; a "See what I can endure" kind of thing. "What are
you doing that for? Are you being a Tom Sawyer walking on a fence for Becky?"
Number one, that doesn't work. All you're doing is destroying yourself. If
it hurts, stand up. Don't shoe a horse in the noonday sun just to prove you're
tougher than the rest of them. I used to do that. We had these big barns.
I'd set them right next to a water trough, and I would be John Wayne! You
know, riding into Hondo or something. I'd dunk my head in the thing, blow
bubbles, take my shirt off, put it back on _ "I don't need shade! Look at
this tough guy out here!" And I'd shoe the horse, and all the rest of the
guys would say, "You're nuts!" And I'd say, "Yes!" And I can look back on
it and I can still say "Yes," but I can also grin about it; it makes a fine
story. "Look at this idiot, he did survive!"

ANVIL: You must have sort of a creative genius about you in that you
do your ironwork that way and you also write that way.

BRUCE: No, oh no. I'm a mule. I tell everybody that. I copy, I start
by copying. Like I say, writing a story is absolutely simple _ there's no
genius in that. Like I tell people, if you can tell me the story, you can
write it.

ANVIL: Would you recommend that a "budding" smith try to get involved
in a fair?

BRUCE: No, it's too dangerous. You have to be good or you'll hurt
somebody, unless you just want to sit there and turn shoes and do very simple
things. What I like to do is pass on the magic. Let the people know that
it's not dead, that we can actually do these things, so I do a lot of
forge-welding out in front. For instance, watching a forge- weld. For a starting
smith, they're just concentrating on getting the piece made, but what the
people want is an exchange. They want to reach out and touch it. They see
you doing an ancient thing and there's a "touching" that wants to happen,
and I do it verbally. I look out at them and you can actually feel the vibes
coming at you. I look up, smile, and talk to them as I'm working. This makes
it magical. And so, for a beginning smith, if you want to turn a shoe, that's
fine. In fact, that's all they ever ask me, "Do you make horseshoes?" Yes,
for five bucks with your name on it, but you have to watch me do it. That's
the requirement. Also, I bring "all but the kitchen sink" as far as steel,
so when people ask me to make something, I usually can. And when they get
to watch it being made, and that's magic! As for the dangers of it _ if you're
cutting something off and you hit it a little bit too hard, you send a hot
piece of steel out in the crowd. Or, if you're forge- welding and get it
too hot, and you hit it and it comes apart, you're going to burn somebody.
What you should try to do is get on with somebody who does it. There are
others, but I don't think anybody makes an axe. The amount of slag and stuff
that flies out of there is very dangerous.

ANVIL: I've never seen anybody forge a rasp into the edge of an axe.

BRUCE: The reason for the rasp is that it has the teeth so when you're
pulling it out of the fire, sweeping around with it. I've done it without
a rasp, and that little piece in there, everything is molten and slippery,
and it will flip forward usually, and you have a gap right behind that thing
that's all the way through the axe. With a rasp, you close the walls down
and it won't move. That's the main reason, the big teeth on it. It won't
slip at all, and I have millions of them. Tell the horse you saved the rasp
to make snakes out of. You saw my snakes here. Snakes and bits for tomahawks.
When they get old and gray, you can make $42 snakes out of an $18 rasp. Henry
Ford should have had the technology that we have as horseshoers!

ANVIL: So recycling is the name of the game?

BRUCE: Right. So, if there are any old rasps out there, send them
to me because I make snakes out of them.